The core team in Vienna

A number of people have contributed to the conceptualisation, design, development and integration of the planning tool.

Christoph Becker was the Lead Architect of PLATO. In 2010 he completed his PhD thesis in computer science entitled "Trustworthy Preservation Planning". He was leading the sub-project Scalable Planning and Watch of the FP7-funded project SCAPE.

Michael Kraxner was leading the core development.

Kresimir Duretec was involved in the core development and particularly focused on the relationships of planning and automated monitoring.He was leading the sub-project Scalable Planning and Watch of the FP7-funded project SCAPE.

Markus Plangg was involved in the core development and particularly focused on visualisation, automated experimentation and Taverna workflows.

Petar Petrov was involved in the core development and particularly focused on collection analysis as the author of the content profiling tool c3po.

Hannes Kulovits was involved in core development and design, case studies and training events. Currently he is leading the operational deployment of the planning tool into the Austrian State Archive's production-level archival system.

Prof. Andreas Rauber acted as Senior Advisor to the core team.

Further contributions came from the team in Vienna, primarily from Mark Guttenbrunner, Stephan Strodl, Markus Hamm, Thomas Lidy and Florian Motlik.

Partnerships and integrated tools

Plato is integrating and using tools and services from a variety of sources. Our documentation page contains several papers explaining the challenges addressed by the incorporation of these components.

For characterisation and quality assurance:

  • DROID (Digital Record Object Identification)
  • JHove, the JSTOR/Harvard Object Validation Environment
  • FITS, the File Information Toolset
  • ImageMagick compare

Integrated and accessed registries:

Preservation action services:

  • Taverna workflows as base for preservation actions
  • MiniMEE performance-aware migration services

Compatible repositories and plan execution environments:

  • EPrints has included a plugin that reads Plato 3 plans and executes preservation actions in a repository
  • RODA has a prototype implementation to execute actions of Plato 4 plans

The SCAPE Project

SCAPE project

The SCAPE project was a 3.5 year project running from 2011 until 2014. One of the key results of SCAPE is an automated planning component that brings together repository operations and policies with content, action components, measures, and automated watch to provide a traceable lifecycle of operational planning. During the project the capabilities of the automated planning component (based on the planning tool Plato) have been substantially enhanced in terms of automation and scalability.

In general the SCAPE project has enhanced the state of the art of digital preservation in three ways: by developing infrastructure and tools for scalable preservation actions; by providing a framework for automated, quality-assured preservation workflows and by integrating these components with a policy-based preservation planning and watch system. These concrete project results have be validated within three large-scale Testbeds from diverse application areas: Digital Repositories from the library community, Web Content from the web archiving community, and Research Data Sets from the scientific community. Each Testbed has been selected because it highlights unique challenges. SCAPE has developed scalable services for planning and execution of institutional preservation strategies on an open source platform that orchestrates semi-automated workflows for large-scale, heterogeneous collections of complex digital objects.

The partners of this project are:
  • AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH
  • The British Library
  • Internet Memory Foundation
  • Ex Libris Ltd.
  • Fachinformationszentrum Karlsruhe - Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftlich-Technische Information GmbH
  • Koninklijke Bibliotheek
  • KEEP SOLUTIONS LDA
  • Microsoft Research Limited
  • Österreichische Nationalbibliothek
  • Open Preservation Foundation
  • Statsbiblioteket
  • Science and Technologies Facilities Council
  • Technische Universität Berlin
  • Technische Universität Wien
  • The University of Manchester
  • Universite Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6
  • Brno University of Technology
  • Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center
  • West University of Timisoara
  • Wielkopolskie Center of Pulmonology and Thoracosurgery

To find out more about the SCAPE Project please visit scape-project.eu.

The Planets Project

Planets logo

Plato was one of the key results of the European project PLANETS.

Planets, Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services, was a four-year project co-funded by the European Union under the Sixth Framework Programme to address core digital preservation challenges. The primary goal for Planets was to build practical services and tools to help ensure long-term access to our digital cultural and scientific assets. Planets started on 1st June 2006 and ended on May 31 2010. The strong Planets consortium brings together expertise across Europe from national libraries and archives, leading research universities and technology companies. Coordinated by the British Library, the partners are:

  • The British Library
  • The National Library of the Netherlands
  • Austrian National Library
  • The Royal Library of Denmark
  • State and University Library, Denmark
  • The National Archives of the Netherlands
  • The National Archives of England, Wales and the United Kingdom
  • Swiss Federal Archives
  • University of Cologne
  • University of Freiburg
  • HATII at the University of Glasgow
  • Vienna University of Technology
  • The Austrian Institute of Technology
  • IBM Netherlands
  • Microsoft Research Limited
  • Tessella Plc

A follow-on organisation called the Open Planets Foundation (OPF) has been founded. OPF is a not-for-profit company, registered in the UK. To find out more about the OPF and how to join, please visit openpreservation.org/.